Skip to main content

The Results of CAFTA...

Here is one of the first stories I have seen about the use of CAFTA (the Central America Free Trade Agreement) by a corporation to bully a signatory nation into changing it's laws or cough up millions of dollars in damages. We have seen this repeatedly with NAFTA. These investor-to-state rights provisions of these trade agreements are incredibly anti-democratic and one of the most dangerous elements of these agreements. This is from a CISPES update...

On December 9, 2008, Canadian-based Pacific Rim Mining Corp. filed a Notice of Intent (NOI) to begin arbitration proceedings against the government of El Salvador . The NOI was filed under Central America-Dominican Republic-United States of America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) laws, and serves as the first step in opening up legal proceedings against El Salvador (Canada is not a member of CAFTA but the arbitration would be filed under its US-based subsidiary, Pac Rim Cayman.) The company and country will have 90 days to amicably resolve their dispute. If no resolution is reached by March 9, 2009 – just six days before the Salvadoran presidential election — Pacific Rim can then open arbitration proceedings under the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States and under the Rules of Procedure for Arbitration Proceedings of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)—an affiliate of the World Bank.

Pacific Rim maintains that it has invested over $75 million dollars in the El Dorado mining project and that there is potential for huge returns and the creation of new jobs. The company claims that, despite its compliance with all laws, the government of El Salvador has failed to grant the permits to begin to exploit the gold and silver mine. An eventual lawsuit is expected to demand several hundred million dollars in damages from El Salvador , an amount that would further damage a country that is already in a dire economic situation, in part due to the effects of the CAFTA-DR accord.

Citizens' organizations in El Salvador have come out very strongly against mining, and specifically against the El Dorado project. Environmentalists contend that the project would lead to acid drainage, water pollution, and the evaporation of cyanide, thus devastating the environment and public health. The “I Reject Metal Mining” campaign is a combined effort of a broad spectrum of environmental, labor rights, and community organizations that has held many demonstrations and educational events throughout the country. Some political analysts have suggested that the timing of the NOI, putting the end of the 90-day grace period just days before the presidential elections, opens the possibility that the governing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party could claim that a victory by the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party would open El Salvador to losing the several hundred million dollar lawsuit.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Honduran Civil Society Leaders Visit Chicago, Advocate for Restoration of the Constitutional Government and an End to Human Rights Violations...

Honduran Civil Society Leaders Visit Chicago, Advocate for Restoration of the Constitutional Government and an End to Human Rights Violations La Voz de los de Abajo, Casa Morazán and NALACC invite you to panel discussions and community forums in Chicago with leaders of Honduran civil society touring U.S. with immigrant leaders to advocate for the restoration of the constitutional government and an end to the escalating human rights violations. One month after the interruption of constitutional order in Honduras through a military coup d’état and in the wake of widespread reports of human rights violations harkening back to events of the 1980s, the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) is bringing a delegation of civil society representatives from that country to the U.S. to participate in a speaking tour and to advocate for the restoration of constitutional order and respect for human rights. U.S. based Latino immigrant leaders will also join this del

In memory of Rafael Gomez Nieto, the anti-fascist COVID victim two wars could not kill, on the first anniversary of his passing…

When I was an up and coming young socialist high-school, then college student, moving gradually away from Liberation Theology, towards some form of democratic socialist-humanism, the example of the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939 made a major impact on my thinking. I knew instinctively and without question Stalinism and Maoism had nothing to offer. How could two of the century's most brutal dictators have anything to say about creating a future free of oppression. What I was looking for was historical examples of a new stage in the movement toward full human freedom, one in which working class people were in control of their lives and their future. No bosses, no party bureaucrats, no cults of personality and increasingly, in a departure from my past, no gods. Probably the first and certainly one of the most influential works of revolutionary literature that I encountered was Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia , hence my Orwell attachment to this day. Soon following were the equall

1877-2011: 134 Years of Social Struggle in Pilsen...

1877-2011: 134 Years of Social Struggle in Pilsen Haymarket’s Crucible / RodiÅ¡tì Revoluce: As German immigrant August Spies made his way down Blue Island Avenue to a rally of striking lumberyard workers on May 3rd 1886, the day before the Haymarket incident, he would have heard other recent immigrants conversing in Czech (or Bohemian as it was than called). Some of them may have been carrying that day’s edition of Svornost, Chicago’s Czech language daily for “freethinkers,” or Budoucnost, the city’s Czech anarchist newspaper. He may have passed one of the Sokol Halls in the neighborhood, Czech community centers and meeting places for athletic, artistic, cultural and political activities. In the 1880’s, Pilsen, the Lower West Side Chicago industrial neighborhood sandwiched between the Union Pacific railroad tracks and the South Branch of the Chicago River, was a Czech enclave. Hence its name, a transplant from the Czech city of Plzen in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, like many of